Jay Bruce owners got their first bit of good news from him as he fractured his wrist. This is like when you’re in a terrible relationship that you can’t get out of because you’re scared to be alone, then the other person comes home and says they’re leaving you. In 12 teams or shallower and non-keeper leagues, I’d remove Jay Bruce from the salamander and chuck him. Even if he comes back, he wasn’t hitting when his wrist bone was connected to his forearm bone. As for keepers, I thought Bruce would be a good sleeper candidate for next year. Now with the nature of his injury, I’m not so sure. If he needs surgery, it’ll be a much longer process. (When this post went to the (Word)presses, they weren’t sure if Bruce needed surgery.) To go out on a limb — something Bruce can’t do so well right now — I’m calling Jay Bruce a top fantasy sleeper for 2011 — when we’ll all be taking flying cars to our draft. Chris Dickerson, who had the start and a steal yesterday, gets an added boost as he’ll see time against righties. That’s until Dusty grows bored of him. Anyway, here’s what else I saw yesterday in fantasy baseball:

Jonathan Sanchez – Last no-hitter for the Giants was John Montefusco. Before picking up Sanchez, think about everyone that picked up Montefusco after his no-hitter. (Okay, there was no such thing as fantasy baseball when Montefusco pitched his, but I think you get my point.) If Sanchez had pitched a two-hitter instead of a no-hitter, would you even be considering him? Things that make you say hmm…

Barry Zito – 4 1/3 IP, 9 ER. As the BBWAA hold a caucus at the All-Star Game about giving Zito’s Cy Young to Pedro Martinez.

John Bowker – 2-for-4, HR yesterday. I promise this is my last Giants player blurb. Bochy is supposedly going to play Bowker every day. Bowker’s proven more than capable in the minors. This year’s Triple-A numbers are 63/17/63/.347/10 with more walks than strikeouts. In NL-Only leagues, you should absolutely grab him. In mixed leagues, I’d wait a few unless you’re absolutely hurting for power.

Ryan Church – The recession is hitting everyone, and now the Braves will only carry left-handed scissors. I wouldn’t bother with Church, except on short schedule days when you’re just playing matchups.

James Shields – 6 1/3 IP, 3 ER, 2 Ks. Why can’t he hold a damn lead? Seriously. What the eff? And two Ks? Who are you, Joel Pineiro?

Brett Anderson – Left after four innings because his back stiffened up. A’s are saying he should be fine and Steven Tyler’s saying he’ll be F-I-N-E.

Josh Whitesell – Tony Clark’s release means two things. 1) Josh Whitesell should get the call-up. He’s a decent flier in NL-Only play. 2) The Diamondbacks are now without a center for their pickup basketball games.

Ryan Ludwick – 5-for-9 in the doubleheader and 2 HRs, then robotically walked onto the field saying, “I must kill the Queen.”

Garrett Jones – Hit his 5th homer yesterday. That’s his fifth homer in 11 games. That includes a three homer weekend. He also has 3 steals while batting .310. What else is in Garrett Jones’s locker? He bats third and there’s really no one on the Pirates to challenge him for that spot if he hits…. Or even if he doesn’t hit.

Ryan Doumit – Returned from the DL. People are clamoring for Doumit like he’s going to save their team. Last year was the outlier. He’s worth a flier because he’s a catcher, but he may only hit 7 homers with a .260 average the rest of the way. Not to mention, he’s injury-prone.

Yovani Gallardo – 5 IP, 5 ER. Has now thrown 9 walks in the last 10 innings. As I pointed out a few weeks ago, he’s been pitching closer to a 4 ERA than a 3. Trust me, I’m not thrilled either.

Clayton Kershaw – 6 IP, 1 ER, 2 hits, 5 walks. Over the course of 99 and 2/3 innings this year, he’s issued 59 walks. Okay, hotshot, how many more hits than walks has he given up? A) 1-10 B) 11-20 C) 21-30 D) None of the Above E) Colonel Mustard. If you guessed A, you looked up his stats pretty quick, cheater. He’s given up 9 more hits than walks. I don’t feel like doing the research, but has anyone in the history of baseball ever thrown more than 100 innings and had less than 10 more walks than hits while maintaining a sub-3.50 ERA? Betcha Jayson Stark or some doode wearing a bow tie at Elias Sports Bureau knows.

Team A picked up Bucholtz on tuesday. According to league rules he isn’t allowed to drop him until the following week. In order to complete a trade with Team C, he needed to drop a player so he trades Bucholtz to Team B for Nolan Reimold. Both players are subsequently dropped within minutes and Team A completes his trade with Team C. Team A avoids having to drop a more valuable player by using Team B’s roster. Therefore, 2 teams worked together to the detriment of the rest of the league.

Shady? Yes.

Collusion? I dunno? There is no definition for collusion in the league constitution, just that collusion will result in the expulsion of the teams involved but the trade just doesn’t seem right. Team B saw no benefit from the trade other than to help out Team A.

Any thoughts? I think razzball commentators are generally smart and witty individuals and I just wanted all of your opinions.

@johnson21: well i wouldn’t drop cuchholz at this point given he’s getting to start on friday. what kind of league is it? are you desperate for avg in a roto league? kendrick doesn’t give you anything else. i’d probably ride stewart/hill and bet on their avg being better in the 2nd half (though come on, aaron hill is batting like .290).

@Sucklingduck: i wouldn’t say so. clever management. especially if Team B was dropping reimold anyway. would it have been less collusive if Team B had kept buchholz while Team A immediately dropping reimold? maybe Team B intended to keep buchholz but someone unexpectedly coming off the DL forced him to drop someone.

i view collusion as something where the last place team deals pooholes to the 2nd place team for joel pineiro because he is pissed at the guy in first and doesn’t want him to win.

i’m also ok with vetoing a trade that is so egregious that it throws the balance of the league out of whack, but it has to be uniformly egregious by the non-participating league members.

@ThePoonTycoon: i concur aboutthe last place guy dealing to a top contending team when it just doesn’t matter for that guy…. but then again you’re saying the bottom guy can’t manage his team anymore? He can’t try and at least steal some points back and change the outcome of the league? In our league pretty much all trades go thru…. unless its something like Hanley, Pujols, and Wright for crap, crap and crap… it should go thru….

@Sucklingduck: ur league has a small flaw… Or the managers figured out a loophole… I dont see it as some huge deal.

I made a deal trading Big papi and Holliday for JOHAN SANTANA about 3 weeks ago. My league went nuts, saying i’m raping the guy for johan, blah blah blah…. well big papi as hit like 10 HR’s since then, Johan has given me two good outtings, two so so outtings… moral: you never know whats gonna happen in a trade, guys get hurt, guys slump, they don’t trend the way they have in years past….

just go with the flow, manage your team and dont worry so much about everyone elses….

@Tony Y: you can’t convince me that a deal as egregious as poohole for pineiro would net points in favor for the last place team. he can manage, but he shouldn’t make terrible deals just cause he’s in last. if he has pooholes and he wants pitching, he should take no less than lincecum/johan/halladay/grienke in return. if someone is not willing to make that deal then he should hold pooholes and affect the league standings by not dealing away the best hitter in the league instead of selling him at 10 cents on the dollar just to pick up whatever it is joel pineiro brings to the table.

@Tony Y: even trading pooholes for a bunch of steal and a high end closer or 2 would be fine IN A ROTO LEAGUE if you wanted to try to sneak a couple of spots up the steals or saves categories and you were already at the bottom of the power categories. would i do it? no, because i’d prefer to not hand someone a championship, but i could see someone doing it if they wanted to at least try to finish out of the cellar.

I’d like to take a flier on Bowker in my 20-team mixed league. My least-used position player is Ryan Spilborghs. The other guy I’d consider dropping is Chris Duncan. Position scarcity doesn’t figure into this decision because each team has three UTIL spots and deep benches.

Spilly doesn’t play very often, but when he does he gives me a nice variety of stats. He’s been mentioned in trade rumors ever since the Rox called up Dexter Fowler, but nothing has materialized yet. Duncan plays more often, but he’s been in a two-month slump and hasn’t shown any sign of the pre-injury 25 HR upside that I was hoping for when I drafted him.

If adding new blood at the break and considering any of FraGu, Fox, Garret “Baseball’s Been Good to Me” Jones, or any other hot rookies, should we keep Braun-like expectations in check and grab one of the more proven comodities that have found themselves on the waiver wire this season like Cameron, Burrell, Encarnacion or Willingham? With the assumption being that the rookies will succumb to correction and the vets will go on a tear levelling their numbers to their annual production. My thought is that championships are not won by playing it safe…Does any one of the above stand out for the second half, or someone else more worthy of a roster spot?

@zombie: i’d probably go burrell or encarnacion from that group. none of the rookies are projected to be anything special. i’m not saying i wouldn’t be watching all those guys and have a short leash on whoever i picked.

@johnson21: How many MIs are you going to carry? I’d lose Buchholz if you don’t need that one start.

@Sucklingduck: Why are two teams working together? That’s very shady. What did they say was going on? They were working together to work around the rules? What happens when they figure out it makes sense for one team to send their good players to the top team and split the top team’s winnings? I wouldn’t play with people like that.

here’s the timeline of what happened.
7:30 Team A trades Bucholtz to Team B for Reimold
7:41 Team B drops Bucholtz and picks up Willingham
7:45 Team A drops Reimold
7:55 Team A trades Greinke/Stewart to Team C for Longoria/Uggla/Cabrera

Team A needed to clear roster space. He couldn’t drop Bucholtz because he picked him up earlier in the week. So instead of dropping another player with more value, he trades Bucholtz to Team B. My question is what is the benefit of acquiring Bucholtz for team B other than to do Team A a favor? Couldn’t Team B just have dropped Reimold and picked up Willingham himself?

They basically found a loophole and I agree it’s not ‘collusion’ in the normal sense but it’s two teams working together to the detriment of the rest of the league right? Collusion – probably not. Shady as hell – yup in my book.

Last night I dropped from 8th (out of 12) to 10th in HRs. This is dispiriting.

I wasn’t counting on (or even recently starting) Bruce, but the promise of a potential .260/20 donk second half at least kept my spirits up. Now, in an Omar Minaya-esque effort to juice my sadsack team, I swapped Joneses, dropping Andruw (oh-for-13 since my pick-up) for Garrett.

I have also offered Gallardo straight-up for Carlos Lee. Something’s gotta be done about my hitting.

Really, I have to believe that Wright (as I’ve written here) will put up 16-to-20 HRs in the second half, despite all indications. It’s inconceivable to me that he’d go from 33 HR to 10 in a year.

Also, if Billy Beane doesn’t trade Holliday, I will commit seppuku. I worry that, at this point, it’s just pride holding Beane back, because he worries he won’t get near the haul in return that he sent out. So he’ll wait for the magical “draft choices” because, hey, the fans can always believe those picks will turn out to be Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron.

@Grey: they joined as replacements. to make things even shadier is that they are friends in real life. but no one can prove what Team B was thinking when he traded for Bucholtz. I guess it took him 11 minutes of Smoltz pitching to decide to drop Bucholtz. We can’t kick them without using Sportsjudge. I don’t know if it would be worth the trouble.

@Grey: I don’t think I can get even Dunn for Holliday at this point. He generates little interest in my shallow league (hell, I didn’t even want him. I got him for Wells/Gregg, hoping he’d end up elsewhere. At this point, even with Wells as a washout, that’s not a good trade for me….)

Also, the guy who owns Dunn hasn’t made a trade in about three years. He is a nervous nellie.

I could try to get Fielder except I traded Fielder away (getting back Miguel Cabrera)…. still, that owner’s not doing better and seems willing to make blockbusters.

Or, I could go for the nuclear option: Trade, say, Wright/Gallardo/Wieters for A-Rod/Sandoval, or some combo thereof.

@Grey: hey grey, regarding the gallardo ofr lester offer. how would you rank edwin jackson with those 2 for the 2nd half? am i crazy for being more comfortable with offering gallardo over edwin for lester?

@Baron Von Vulturewins: Speaking of Omar Minayaesque efforst – Fernando Tatis’ homerun yesterday broke a streak of 299 Metsies at bats without a dinger. That is mindblowing, or for us Mets fans, soul sucking. They are becoming unwatcheable. I find myself putting on Yankee games on the tube, for goodness sake! And yeah, as hard as it is to believe, I now can see David Wright hitting 10 homeruns this season. Metco has him psyched out. Come to think of it, 10 might lead the Mets in home runs.

@Grey: I not only have the Talkin Heads going on in my brain, I have Reggie Jackson transposing into Ryan Luddwick, walking up to the plate like a zombie and crashing home runs. At any rate, my RCL team sure appreciates the efforts.

Is it time to cash in my chips with Millwood? I had a nice run with him, but it seems it is over…

@Grey: Yet another brilliant writeup. A guy in my league who has 155 transactions just dropped Nolasco. I assume you’ll advise to pick him up over Jurrjens, but I may be wrong so I’m writing this post. Thanks…

I desperately need help in the HR and RBI dept. and just got an offer of Aaron Hill for my Adam Jones and Jered Weaver. This would be a serious upgrade at 2B (Scutaro now) and would still leave me with plenty of good, young OFs (Granderson, Upton brothers, Rios). Am I giving up too much? Will Hill continue to hit for power like he is now?

@JaHerer: I’d have to imagine Hill being a Sell for the second half. I dont see him hitting much more than 30 homers tops so that gives him about 10 more. I think those of use that owned him the first half got the best he has to offer so i wouldn’t give up too much to get him IMO.

You have been touting Garret Jones since he came up. I ingnored both posts. He hits a 3HR weekend, you post again. I finally sign him, still light years ahead of anyone else in my league. I must learn to place blind trust in the Grey! You were spot on.

I’ve literally been trying to get Votto off this guy all year. I’ve offered such things as Kazmir/Burrell/Victorino/pick any 3 players on my team deals all year. Today I get on and he offered me Votto for Juan Rivera and Braden. I didn’t even think twice before accepting… However, now I can’t lightly chuckle when you talk about his depression/dizzy spells.

@cubbies299: Votto will have a big second half. The avg will come down, obv., but look at his counting stats: 11HR and 42RBI in 202 AB, or roughly 2/3 of everyone else. So he should have roughly 16 – 18HR and 60RBI… which I think is roughly what you can expect if he stays healthy all second half…

@cubbies299: I want Votto too and since he’s only $7 in my auction league w/ $3 inflation… that’s even better. This guy will not give him up. I’m thinking of offering Howard $25) for Votto straight up. What do you guys think?

@Grey: @ThePoonTycoon: @Tony Y: @pablo: Thanks for all of your input! I tried not to make a big deal about it but the only explanation i got was “it’s not against the league constitution”. I could be a anal phucktard and try and define the term “collusion” for them but frankly, I’ll just be happy winning their money.

Who to drop when Quentin comes of the DL: Hafner, Rasmus or Helton? This is for my DH slot.

Any thoughts on Alex Gordon? I stashed him away but is he going to produce anything better than Beckham or Teahan the rest of the way?

Is Carlos Q coming off the DL this week? Then I have a DL spot for Bruce, who I can maybe trade in 6 weeks assuming no one else gets injured. Is there someone better to have hogging up that DL spot that’s coming back soon?

@Grey:
weekly line-up league , 5×5 roto
assuming IF carpenter pitches during this short week , it will be against haren on sunday ….
i have one open spot .
harden @ washington
bergesen @ chisox (contreras)
volstad @ philly (moyer)
or
cueto vs gallardo

Got another question for the experts: My SPs= Wainwright, Nolasco Vasquez, Lackey, Liriano, Kaz, Hanson, Price. When I drafted I waited until the 6th round to start on pitching and by then the cream of the crop were snatched up. I know my pitching is stinky. Should I drop two of my SPs and grab a couple of good middle relief guys to help with era? I am in last in my 10 team H2H and I am not going down without a fight.

Random question: Can anyone think of a real trade where a team is trying to shed salary or get something for a free agent they won’t re-sign and they include a good prospect/young player as well, but they get burned because all they get back is a crappy prospect/young player or two that ended up sucking?